There has only really been one topic of conversation at Guardian Online this week - the sudden surge in the number of Wi-Fi hot spots. In case you've missed the hype, Wi-Fi hot spots are wireless LAN networks set up in public places like caf¿s, restaurants and airport lounges. Provided their laptop, or PDA has Wi-Fi facilities (either built in or added via card) geeks can pop in for a brew and surf the web and send and receive e-mail at very high speeds.
Up until this week the number of hot spots was limited to about a hundred Internet caf¿s and coffee shops in London, several upmarket hotels and a few airports. Now BT, in conjunction with Toshiba, has unveiled a £300 'hot spot in a box' kit that will enable pub landlords and small hotel owners to create their own Wi-Fi networks. Even more significantly a group called The Cloud this week delivered Wi-Fi facilities to over 200 pubs dotted around the country. It hopes that over a thousand locals will be offering fast wireless web access by the end of the year.
Hot spots are great news for business travellers. Not only do they offer much faster Internet access than they could acheive via mobile phone networks, they also give them a legitimate excuse to spend an hour or so in the pub. The fees charged to use hot spots are small (around £5 for half an hour's surfing), and as setting up and maintaining hot spots is cheap, the days when your pint comes with free fast internet access probably isn't far away. Basically everyone's a winner from the equipment providers to the caf¿/pub owners to the would-be net surfers.
It is a little ironic then that a technology that was such a failure over a decade ago should bounce back in such a spectacular style. Hot spots, or location-based network access services, were big news in the late 80s and nearly 90s when mobile phone network coverage was rather piecemeal. Only they were used for voice calls rather than accessing data. Four services were launched; Phonepoint, Mercury Callpoint, Zonephone, and, by far the most famous, Hutchison's Rabbit system. They worked by enabling a subscriber to make and receive phone calls as long as they were within 100 metres of a transmitter. These were sited at train stations, airports and garage forecourts.
Sadly for Hutchison and its rivals, users found having to visit a certain point to use their phones very inconvenient. As soon as wider coverage became available they deserted the location-specific service in their thousands.
Curious then that Wi-Fi, a location based service, might help kill off the prospects of 3G phone systems that offer universal coverage, as pioneered in the UK by - you guessed it - Hutchison.
The history of consumer electronics is littered with examples of technologies that failed, only to rise phoenix-like from the ashes years later.
During the 70s, serious hi-fi buffs aspired to owning multi-channel Quadraphonic sound systems. Those same rock fans are a older and wiser now, but chances are they have once again embraced a multi-channel sound format in either DVD-Audio or Super Audio CD, and are thrilling to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon caressing their ears from six speakers.
It's also amazing to think that interactive TV, so commonplace now, has its roots in a failed experiment conducted by Warner Communications in the mid 1970s. The company kitted out an entire town of Columbus, Ohio, with special boxes that delivered thirty channels, game shows the viewer could play along with, shopping stations and video on demand. The system, know as Qube, ran for six years before Warner's reluctantly pulled the plug.
Later this year Microsoft, via its Media2go technology, is attempting reinvent video on the move. The theory is that users will record video from their TV or PC that they can store on a hard disk-based device and view later on the bus or train.
The company will hope to avoid the pitfalls experienced by Sony in the early 90s, when it launched the Watchman personal handheld LCD TV. In spite of encouraging initial sales, users soon tired of a screen whose pictures couldn't be seen in sunlight and a battery life of minutes rather than hours.
One last example is the recent rush of tiny Windows-based laptops whose form factor owes a great deal to Psion and its once hugely popular Series 5 and 7 PDAs.
So, perhaps budding entrepreneurs should be combing consumer electronics history books looking for other technologies to revive. Any takers for a souped-up version of the eight track cartridge? Or maybe there's a killer application just waiting to be discovered for the BSB Squarial.
